


What's Coming For You

by coraxes



Series: Repair [4]
Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: Developing Relationship, F/M, M/M, Multi, Time Travel Fix-It, just a dash of, this could be fluff but you're too busy angsting over your impending doom, trephacard do not appear in this fic but their kids do
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-08
Updated: 2019-11-08
Packaged: 2021-01-25 05:11:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21350785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coraxes/pseuds/coraxes
Summary: A month after Lisa invites herself into Dracula’s castle and his life, they receive a visitor who is stranger still—bearing news neither of them wants to hear.Really, Maria wasjusttrying to track down her stupid quarter-vampire brother.
Relationships: Alucard | Adrian Tepes | Arikado Genya/Trevor Belmont/Sypha Belnades, Dracula/Lisa (Castlevania)
Series: Repair [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1396264
Comments: 31
Kudos: 429





	What's Coming For You

**Author's Note:**

> it's been almost a year to the day since I first posted _repair_. (which...whew.) i began writing this in the middle of chapter 2 as a way to decompress, so it's been stewing for a while. originally it was a fun romp from Nugget #1's POV, but writing Drac/Lisa made me want to try out Drac POV, which automatically made everything a lot more angsty. 
> 
> if you've been reading the series since then, thank you for sticking with it; if you just started this fic and have no idea what the hell i'm talking about, thank you for picking up this one. (as long as you don't need a trephacard origin story, this will probably make sense.) y'all are all great and i love writing fic for these idiots. s3 when??

Dracula had grown used to strange noises in his castle. Before Lisa had become part of his daily life, the hum of electricity, the rush of water in the plumbing, the slow grind of the forges—they lingered in the background, the closest he ever knew to quiet. Sometimes the centuries of magic and death attracted stray spirits and the occasional stranger apparition; he had learnt to ignore those unless they sounded as if they might present a problem.

The exasperated, “Matty, I _will_ kick your ass, I don’t _care_ if you’re eight, come out right now,” floating from somewhere in the South wing, sounded as if it could present a problem.

Even Lisa looked up from her microscope. “Did you hear something?”

When he ignored her scent he could pick out another, human but strangely familiar, along with the sound of footsteps. “We have a visitor.” Lisa pushed her goggles up on her forehead, exposing the indents where they’d pressed into her skin. For centuries he had managed to go without finding anything endearing, but the strangest things about Lisa managed to catch him off-guard. She caught his eye and the corner of her mouth quirked up. Dracula had to force himself not to return the smile. “No need to disturb yourself; I’ll take care of it.”

Much more clearly now, the intruder called, “Father? Papa? Mother?” Nerves had displaced the irritation in their voice.

Lisa frowned, so it must have drawn very close indeed. “That sounds like a child. I should go talk to them.”

“Sounding like a child and being a child are two different things. They did not enter through any physical doors.” The castle’s security would have alerted him if they had. Though if it was an illusion, it was a good one; few bothered to manufacture a scent. Lisa just looked at him, and Dracula sighed. “Let me go ahead of you?”

Graciously she gestured for him to lead the way.

The intruder’s footsteps quickened outside the laboratory doors and their heart began to slow back to normal. “Very funny, guys, I can hear you—”

Before they could reach the doors, Dracula threw them open.

The intruder appeared to be a girl of about sixteen, with dark brown hair cropped around her ears. She was dressed comfortably in a loose tunic and patched trousers—carrying no weapons, not even wearing boots, just worn socks. A fine layer of dust lay on her head and streaked her hands. She staggered back, looked Dracula up and down, and then scowled. “Grandfather? Really, Matty?” she snapped. Before Dracula could even begin to figure out a response she continued, “Cut that out before Father sees you.”

Then she reached out as if to poke him. Dracula grabbed the girl’s wrist before she could. That, too, felt real—solid but not unbreakable. He could have crushed it but Lisa had drawn closer, and she’d made her opinions on that front quite clear. If she was an illusion—and Dracula’s doubts were deepening—she was a good one. The girl tried to jerk away, making a frustrated noise when his grip didn’t budge. “Calling me grandfather is a bold lie for a human girl to tell.”

The girl tried and failed to extract herself again. Her eyes flickered to where Lisa stood, and her heartbeat kicked up again, adrenaline flooding her veins. “Oh, fuck.”

Dracula smiled, not kindly. “My name is Vlad Dr—”

“Dracula Ṭepeṣ, yes, and that’s Lisa Ṭepeṣ, and oh man I am not supposed to be here,” the girl finished. “Lemme go.”

He shouldn’t have taken his eyes off the girl, whatever she claimed, but couldn’t help glancing at Lisa anyway. Her eyebrows had levitated up her forehead. “Just Lisa.”

The girl laughed nervously. “Whoops.” She tugged again. Strangely her fear had subsided, leaving her looking merely annoyed and a bit curious. Nothing about her smelled of a lie. “Now seriously, let go.”

Lisa glanced at him sidelong. “Vlad,” she prompted.

“Explain,” he ordered, but let go of the girl’s arm.

She shook out her wrist and flexed her fingers. “It’s a long story. Your son raised me—raises me—I guess I must have time traveled?”

“Is that possible?” Lisa asked.

His son—_their _son? It wasn’t the strangest thing Dracula had stumbled upon in this castle. Reluctantly he nodded. “Assuming you are telling the truth.”

The girl snorted. “Oh, c’mon. Father can always tell when I’m lying. I know you can too.”

She was right. And she wasn’t.

Lisa, as she always did, took it in stride, but there was something brittle about her expression. “In that case, we should look into getting you back home.”

The girl nodded. “Thing is, I was looking for my little brother. If I stumbled in here, he might have too.”

Dracula shook his head. “If he _is _here, I haven’t heard him. I suppose he could be buried in one of the further wings.” None of his security measures had warned him of an intruder, so if the boy _was _there he at least hadn’t fallen into a lava pit. If he lived in the castle, hopefully he knew to be careful already.

Rolling her eyes, the girl said, “Yeah, that sounds like Matty.” Lisa gave her a quizzical look. “Short for Mathias.”

Dracula hadn’t heard that name in—a long time. He didn’t realize anyone else knew it. But of course no one else did, _yet_.

“Oh,” said the girl, as if just remembering her manners, “I’m Maria, by the way. Maria Belmont.”

“_What,_” Dracula snapped, drawing himself up to his full height.

“Shit—uh—you remember the thing I said about a long story?”

“Then you will tell it, or I will throw you from my home!” Dracula grabbed Maria’s collar and jerked her into the air.

Lisa grabbed onto his arm and swore at him, but damned if he was going to let some scrawny scrap of a hunter invade _his _castle, no matter _how _she’d come to be there—

“Fuck all the way _off,_” Maria snapped, and clapped her hands over his. Blue and gold magic—no, _electricity_—crackled down his arm, through his veins, making his muscles spasm. Dracula staggered and Maria jerked free of his grip, rolling to her feet. “No wonder your son had to kill you! Christ!”

Lisa had stepped between them and at that her mouth dropped open. Dracula stared between the two women, the anger on both their faces and the _disappointment _in Lisa’s.

His granddaughter was powerful; he could allow that. She certainly hadn’t gotten it from the Belmont side of the family.

Carefully Dracula regained his feet. Maria and Lisa both tensed again.

“Would you like something to drink?” he asked.

Lisa relaxed. Maria eyed them both, frowning, and rubbed the red lines at her neck where her collar had dug into her skin. “Sure,” she said finally, and perked up a bit. “Do you have any beer?”

“What about tea?” Lisa suggested, before Dracula could agree.

So that was how Dracula ended up making tea for his—for Lisa and his granddaughter. Even before Lisa with her human tastes had arrived at his castle, Dracula had kept in the habit. It was perhaps the one human indulgence he’d continued to practice since his turning, and the motions of it were as routine as his visitor was unusual. And—perhaps why Lisa had suggested it—waiting for the water to boil provided him an excuse to give Maria a little space while she and Lisa spoke.

Or, rather, sat in uncomfortable silence one room over.

“You’re staring at me,” Lisa said after a moment.

“Sorry.” Maria sounded not sorry at all. Her knuckles cracked; Dracula wondered if she was wishing for a sword, or a stake. “Only, you look a lot like Father.”

Dracula heard Lisa take a long, steadying breath. Desperately he wanted to see the expression on her face—hope? Disgust? Fear? But if it were the latter two, he would rather find out without his Belmont granddaughter watching.

“Too much?” asked Maria.

A rustle as Lisa shook her head. “Dracula and I—you called me Lisa _Ṭepeṣ_. I’ve hardly lived here a month.”

Had it been such a short time? He hadn’t realized. In the castle time seemed to all run together, especially after centuries had passed. Dracula was so much more…_present, _with Lisa there, the last few weeks had seemed to last years. He couldn’t remember what the castle had been like without her.

“Ooooooh,” Maria said, stretching the syllable out like taffy. “So you two aren’t—”

Lisa laughed, awkward. “We are, but, well. The future you spoke of is still a bit of a surprise.”

Was _that _the part that shocked her? Dracula had thought he made his feelings quite clear in that regard. Even his death made a certain amount of sense. He just didn’t understand the Belmont.

“How did he die?” Lisa asked, urgency creeping into her tone. “What happened, with his son?”

Another nervous crack of Maria’s knuckles, the creeping accelerando of her heartbeat while she searched for her answer. Dracula gripped the edge of the countertop. “You were killed first.”

The lacquered wood groaned as it splintered under his talons. Lisa held her breath.

“Burned for witchcraft,” Maria forged on as if she hadn’t heard him, but she spoke more quickly now. Lisa made a small noise of understanding. “Grandfather didn’t take it well, apparently. I hadn’t been born yet, so I don’t know all the details, but he summoned an army. He meant to be the end of humanity. Nearly _was _the end of Wallachia.”

“Oh, he didn’t,” Lisa breathed, with no real conviction in her voice.

Of course he had. Dracula looked down at the gouges he’d left behind. What else could he have done? Who could expect less of him? A world that dared murder the only person worth something was a world that did not deserve to exist.

But it wouldn’t happen now—Lisa would live; he refused to allow otherwise. The world could keep turning for _her _sake, at least.

“Mother—she’s a Speaker-Magician—she found an old Speaker prophecy that spoke of a way to stop him. It led her to Father, where he was…in hiding.” Maria stuttered over a lie but quickly continued. “Somehow Papa dragged himself in, I suppose because he was the only Belmont around at the time. And they all killed Grandfather. Dracula. They had to.”

Lisa was quiet for a long moment.

The obscenely loud whistle of the teakettle broke the silence, and Dracula snatched it from the heat.

“Is that how your Papa died?” Lisa asked finally.

“What? No, he’s fine,” said Maria, sounding puzzled. “Oh, because of—no, he’s _fine_. They’re all together, Papa and Father and Mother.”

Well, thought Dracula as he added the tea leaves to the kettle, he’d seen stranger. Somehow his son taking up with a Belmont man had slipped lower in his list of priorities.

“Anyway, the moral of the story is: don’t get burned at the stake! Find a bodyguard or something, and everything will be fine and no one will have to die.” Maria thumped her knuckles on the table for emphasis. “Wait, if you don’t die my parents won’t meet each other. Shit. Um.”

A chuckle made its way out of Lisa’s throat. “What are their names? I’ll arrange an introduction.”

Dracula gestured for the laden tea tray to float ahead of him into the dining room. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. His voice came out more steadily than he expected. Lisa shot him a look he couldn’t quite decipher, something between confused and disapproving. She could disapprove of him all she liked; he still dragged his chair closer to hers before he sat down. “Whatever world you’ve created with your revelations here will have no effect on your own time.”

Lisa’s eyes lit up as she reached for her usual mug, the one with the chipped rim. “Whatever world Maria’s created? You mean changing the past splits it off, into its own world?”

“Precisely.” He couldn’t help a smile; by now he should be used to the quickness of her mind, but it never failed to impress him. “Protection, of a sort, from the paradox that concerns her.”

Lisa smiled back, and for a moment Maria and her revelations were forgotten. Then the girl took a loud, pointed slurp of her tea. Dracula glared at her. She bounced her eyebrows at him over the rim of her mug.

Back on track now, Lisa asked, “How did you get here in the first place? Were you, er,” she waved one hand vaguely, “doing a spell?”

Maria shook her head. “Just looking for Matty. He may have done something; he never has gotten into his head that he can’t try out everything in the spellbooks.”

“I’m sure you never gave your parents so much trouble,” Lisa teased.

“They had to keep me out of the weapons.” Maria snickered to herself. “Justine’s the only good one.”

Another grandchild he would never meet. Fantastic. “Be that as it may,” said Dracula, “I rather doubt an eight-year-old had the power or skill to travel through time. Most likely it was a quirk of the castle.” Shortly after he had first moved in, Dracula had walked through a door and into another universe, where he found himself nose-to-nose with a vampire named Gabriel Belmont, also calling himself Dracula. It had not been a pleasant meeting for either of them. He sighed. “It seems to do that often where you Belmonts are concerned.”

Maria looked pleased at that dubious distinction, but only asked, “Will there be a way to get us back? Or—me, I guess, if Matty didn’t come through here.”

Dracula shrugged. If the door they had come through was still open, they should be able to find it. If not, he would have to get…creative. The girl certainly wasn’t going to stay with them. Maria scowled.

“We’ll work something out.” Awkwardly Lisa patted the girl’s hand, and her scowl began to fade.

They were saved from further reassurances by the tug of the castle’s magic. Dracula sat up with a frown.

“Do you hear something?” asked Lisa.

He shook his head, trying to narrow down the source of the pull—ah, there it was. “Someone’s run into one of my security measures.”

“You think it’s—” Maria began.

Dracula nodded and let his body swirl into smoke. “I hate when he does that,” he heard Lisa say, and would have smiled if he could.

The spell that alerted him came from deep in the South wing, a part of the castle dedicated to old artifacts and books he rarely bothered with anymore. Without the spell as a guide even he may have become lost, but after a moment he heard the sounds of battle—fire and metal and panting breath. Dracula came upon the boy as he finished encasing one of the enchanted suits of armor in a block of ice, and turned to the last. As the armor raised its sword, Dracula recorporated. “_Stop_,” he ordered, and the armor obeyed.

It was the fangs Dracula noticed first—not as long as a true vampire’s, but enough to protrude over the boy’s lower lip. His features were human enough, more delicate than his sister’s, but his eyes were bright orange-red. Like his sister he was dressed for the comfort of his own home, and his pale hair—the same blond as Lisa’s—was thick with dust. “Grandfather?” he asked, with none of his sister’s suspicion.

Dracula sighed. “Apparently.” Behind him he heard Lisa’s and Maria’s footsteps drawing nearer.

“How did you get here?”

“This is my home.”

Mathias—the name felt odd, even to think, after all these years—looked down the dimly-lit hall and took this in stride, chewing on his lip. “How did_ I_ get here?”

“Matty!” Dracula turned to see Maria sprinting down the hall, heedless of the dim light. She slid to a halt in front of the molten remains of yet another suit of armor. Mentally Dracula cursed; it had taken him an age to enchant those. She ruffled Mathias’s hair, scattering dust everywhere. “Mathias Belnades, what did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything!” he protested, and sneezed. Maria wrinkled her nose and stepped back from the spray.

While the siblings squabbled, Lisa drew up beside Dracula, taking in the wreckage of Mathias’s fight and then the boy himself. He didn’t appear to be injured, moving easily and not smelling of fresh blood. Dracula watched Lisa determine the same, face carefully neutral. Then she caught him staring. A common enough occurrence by now; but this time she blushed and frowned at them both.

Dracula cleared his throat. “Do either of you remember where you first crossed over from your time?”

Turning from his sister, Mathias appeared to notice Lisa for the first time. His eyes grew very wide, but he only shook his head. “I don’t know. I only realized something was wrong when I saw you.”

Maria nodded her agreement. “It seemed dustier than normal back here, but I was lost for a while. Hard to know what changed.”

Lisa looked very much as if she was trying not to sigh. Magic frustrated her, its insistence on simply _feeling_ and _knowing_ clashing with her insistence on empirical evidence. It had bothered Dracula too, at that, when he first began to study magic; but the lure of power had been too great to ignore.

Mathias looked back the way he had come. “I did pass through a spell back there, I think,” he said, pointing through a dark doorway. “Around one of the libraries.”

Well, Dracula thought, it was a start. “Show us.”

Illuminated by the Speaker fire Matthias conjured in one hand, they walked, the children peppering them with questions. (“Do you turn into a wolf?” “No.” “What about birds? Justine likes to turn into birds.” “No.”) Lisa made a polite effort to engage with them, but that was as strained as Dracula’s own silence—neither of them, he thought, comfortable with the future their grandchildren promised. He should have been eager to learn more about it but none of the questions he had could be answered by children who hadn’t yet been born when he died.

Thankfully they hadn’t gone far before Dracula began to sense the ragged tear between worlds. Mathias noticed at the same time, lifting his nose in the air as if catching a scent. “I think that’s it,” he said, pointing at a doorway. When Dracula narrowed his eyes he could see the edges of the doorway glowing gold. The portal was beginning to knit itself together, healing like a wound, but it would remain open for a few moments yet.

“It is,” he confirmed, and hesitated before turning to his granddaughter and conjuring a torch of his own. “Maria. A moment, before you go?”

She shrugged, although her eyes were wary, and let him guide her down the corridor until he found an alcove that put them out of sight and earshot. Lisa’s, anyway.

“Who was it that killed her? Tell me as much as you can.”

Maria looked unsurprised by the question, but frowned. “I don’t know who gave the order. Some bishop or cardinal or something, I don’t know,” Dracula’s eyes narrowed. There couldn’t be that many in Wallachia. Maria’s eyes narrowed right back. “You can’t kill all of them. He might not even be that rank yet.”

“I know,” Dracula admitted. Maria shot him a disbelieving look. “Lisa wouldn’t stand for it.” And if she left him of her own volition, he couldn’t keep her safe.

Maria scratched the back of her head. “I know it was in 1474, seventy-five, right around there. You were on some sort of journey—traveling like a man, Father always called it, and he was at university.” And the mention of her father, something in her voice went tight and angry. “That’s all I know.”

There it was, the same note he’d heard when she’d first told the story. “You said yourself,” Dracula said icily, “I can tell when you’re lying.”

The girl’s scowl deepened. She glanced down the hall, focusing on her brother’s magical torch in the distance, and then turned back to him. “Father wanted to talk you out of your apocalypse, and you tried to murder him. He still has a scar.” She drew a line with her finger, collarbone to sternum.

There were very few ways to kill a half-vampire. One was ripping their heart out. To have left a scar like that, still visible over a decade later, he must have nearly succeeded.

“Are you even sorry?” she spat, drawing herself up to her full height—still much less than his. “For any of it?”

An insolent creature; Dracula found himself wondering what she’d been like even younger, what battles she had picked with three parents dogging her steps. “I cannot be sorry for what I’ve not yet done.”

Maria crossed her arms and gave him one last baleful glare. “Make better choices, then,” she said fiercely.

She sounded, Dracula thought, like Lisa. “I’ll try,” he said. It fell into dead air, true as it was inadequate. Before the silence could linger between them he gestured back to where they’d left the other two. “We should send you back before the portal closes.”

By the time they returned the portal was beginning to scar over in earnest. Dracula rested a hand on the door frame and used a not-inconsiderable amount of power to hold it open and stable enough for two people to walk through. “Go on, then,” he said, brusque.

Lisa had crossed her arms and balled white-knuckled fists against her side. “It was good to meet you two,” she said, and managed a smile.

“Yeah,” Maria allowed, just as awkward, and then stepped through. She shimmered as she passed through the portal, but Dracula could still see her on the other side, wavering like a mirage some decades into the future. Mathias walked to the threshold, hesitated; then he threw himself backwards and grabbed Lisa’s wrist. “You should come with us,” he said, looking back and forth between her and Dracula. “Both of you—”

“Matty,” his sister snapped. Her image blurred along the edges, beginning to run into the dusty bookshelves.

“Grandfather can teach me magic and Grandmother can work with Father and his medicine, there’s room in the castle for all of us—” Mathias insisted, eyes growing large and watery.

Another man’s voice came through the portal, distant and faded. “Children? I know you’re hiding back here.”

Gently as he could, Dracula disentangled Mathias from his grandmother. “We’ve our own future to live through,” he said. The portal fought against his power, something he couldn’t fight with the tools at hand; all he could do was nudge the boy through. “Now go.”

As Mathias staggered back into his own time another face appeared on the other side of the portal. He seemed pleased with himself as he stumbled across his children; and then he looked up. Behind him, Dracula heard Lisa draw in a breath. Emotion flickered across the man’s face, shock and grief and terrible hope.

And then the portal fell shut, and they were staring into a dark, empty doorway, with nothing but dust for company.

“That was—”

“Yes.”

He stared into the dark, watching the light from his conjured torch flicker over worn wood and dust. Dracula heard Lisa move but didn’t understand her intention until she hooked her arm around his and rested her forehead against his side. The torchlight made her hair glow gold. Burned, they’d said. He hoped, however he had died, it had been worse; he could have deserved no less.

He knelt on the ground, pulling Lisa into his arms, and she grabbed a handful of his collar and kissed him roughly.

“It’s not going to happen,” she told him, pressing her forehead to his. “No one will be killing either of us.”

“I know.” He wouldn’t let it. He kissed her again, slowly this time. Easier, now, to pick out her pulse and heartbeat in the absence of the living; he imprinted the sound in his memory.

After a moment she drew away again. Her hand tightened on the back of his neck. “And even when I die—”

“You _won’t_.”

“I will, someday,” she insisted. “Maybe I’ll be burned for witchcraft. Maybe I’ll grow ill or old. And you’ll grieve. But you will not commit a massacre in my name. You’ll not make that my legacy.” Her nails dug into his skin, her eyes were fierce as any predator’s, the most frightening thing he’d ever seen. “Promise me, Vlad.”

What else could he do?

“I promise,” he said. Lisa nodded, some of the steel leaving her spine. Dracula dropped his forehead to rest between her neck and shoulder, close enough that he could feel her pulse. The urge to bite was still there; it always would be, as long as she insisted on her humanity. Absentmindedly she stroked his hair. “That’s not all that bothers you.”

She hummed, neither assent nor disagreement. “_Bother _may be the wrong word.”

“The rest of the future they spoke of. Our son,” Dracula began, nearly choked on the word, and gave up trying to finish the sentence coherently in favor of pressing a kiss to her collarbone and straightening again. “Does that surprise you?”

Lisa tilted her head; a faint blush had risen to her cheeks. “Does it not surprise _you_?”

“Not in the least.” She quirked an eyebrow and he found it difficult to look directly at her; but he refused to be a coward now. “I love you.”

“Oh,” she breathed, and smiled. “Then I suppose we have a lot to look forward to.”

**Author's Note:**

> dracula: i've only had lisa for a month but if anything happened to her i would kill everyone in the world and then myself  
lisa, bopping him with a rolled-up newspaper: absolutely fucking NOT
> 
> now all the nuggets have names, so if you were on the edge of your seat about that, there you go! i mean, i think that's all the nuggets. sypha shouldn't have to go through any more pregnancies. 3 seems like more than enough.
> 
> as always, comments and kudos are much appreciated.


End file.
